Interview with media titan, Michael J. Fuchs, Cable TV & HBO visionary

0:00 Hi, thanks for tuning in to episode #120 of the Doctor Podcast Show. And I'm Doctor Robert Sicard, your host. We're diverting a little bit today. Usually I have guests discussing various medical topics, but I have a strong interest in the entertainment business and the entertainment world and celebrities and finance. So today I decided to have a guest who is one of the world's leading experts in that, and our guest today is Mr. Michael Fuchs. Mr. Fuchs was a trailblazing executive in the cable television industry, best known for his transformative leadership at HBO, which you've all heard of, where he rose from Director of Special Programming in 1976 to CEO and Chairman by 1984.

0:50 He pioneered original programming, sports production innovations like multiplexing, which we'll discuss, and the launch of Max in around 1980. After earning AJD degree at NYU Law School in 1971, Mr. Fuchs began his career in entertainment law at the William Morris Agency, negotiating early HBO deals for comedians like Robert Klein, David Brenner before joining HBO to shape its identity beyond movies into uncensored commercial free content, which was a first. Under his tenure at HBO, he became a powerhouse with signature shows like Dream On, The Larry Sanders Show, Fraggle Rock, Not Necessarily The News, as well as concerts featuring the great Bette Midler, Diana Ross, Johnny Cash, and achieving the highest profit margins in Time Warner through strategies like selling foreign rights and navigating home video impact.

1:52 He also basically owned the boxing business on HBO. In 1995, he was promoted to head Warner Music Group but was abruptly fired after six months by Time Warner Chairman Gerald Levin at the time amidst clashes during the Turner Broadcasting merger negotiations, executive dismissals leading to all kinds of lawsuits and controversies like dropping the Interscope label over Gangster app, which we'll get into in detail. Mr. Fuse has also been described as a provocative, ego driven visionary with a brash style, likening early HBO to Camelot for its fun, collaborative culture while earning many accolades.

2:41 His insights on the entertainment industry's evolution include the historical role of satellite TV, which is kind of the precursor for the Internet, and multiplexing, concerns over mega mergers, reducing diversity and predictions of Internet convergence, enabling narrow casting, reflecting on media societal influence. So Mr. Fuchs, thanks very much for taking time to join us today. This is a historic interview and I hope to learn a lot today from you. We. Don't know yet if this is historic. I I sense that it will be, I sense the the audience will love this as well because they'll learn many behind the scenes events that nobody's are there any awards for.

3:29 Podcasts are we? Are we up for Where will we be? Is. There an award for, you know, video. Podcast. No Emmys for podcasts or things. Like that? Not that I'm aware of yet, but I can't tell you that Joe Rogan is getting nervous about me, you know? But that's a separate issue. You'd like Joe Rogan just to tell his customers to sign up, you know, to for you to become their doctor. Well, that's a separate issue, right my. My think you'd need a little more office space, but. This is a pretty big studio.

4:05 If Joe Rogan, by the way, needs an eye exam, he knows where to go to as well. So tell us about your early days at the William Morris Agency as an attorney. And then we got an. Attorney for four years before that right and I came from a family that had no entertainment show business basis and it hit me as a kid. I don't I don't know how I mean by the age of seven I was going to double headers in the movie theatres at on Saturday afternoons. I even when I was in college, I was always watching television.

4:41 Some people said, what do you watch television? I said, I'm doing my homework. I was a big Johnny Carson fan and when I got out of law school, I decided I actually went to a corporation for corporate work out of law school. I graduated at NYU and somehow they had a small entertainment division. One of the lawyers was one of the early pioneers of entertainment, but television law. And I went there and I remember asking him, his name was Roy Blakeman. I asked him why, how he was so happy and fulfilled by this.

5:23 And he was, you know, he just said, you know, something you ought to want in your career. He said, But the interesting thing about my career is when he started, he said television was live. So if a client called you, you had to know the answer right there. You couldn't say, well, you know, tape it and then we'll take a look at it. So he, he was obviously very good at what he did. And I said, I remember saying to myself, you better find something if you're going to be happy, you better find something that you know, that that like what Roy said that that you really love and really enjoy doing.

6:01 And I was, you know, somewhat lucky to to have done that. Wow, so you got there by coincidence. How did that lead to you eventually going to HBO? Well, William Morris program, William Morris was doing a lot of the deals, the early stand up comedy deals and I was not happy staying at William Morris. I mean, that's it to me, that's a stepping stone. It wasn't going to be a career. And I gave myself a deadline. If I'm not, if I don't have a more interesting job by October of 76, then I'm going to go to California.

6:38 And I got the HBO job in August. And the first meeting I went to in the first day in the office, I knew that this was made for me. I knew I was comfortable like I was home. Wow. That's that's a great story. Now eventually from director of special programming at HBO, you became CEO. How did that happen and over how many years? Well, it didn't take that many years, but when I came there, the, the real push at the company was circulation and HBO had, you know, very dodgy pro occasionally a program, but we had to play all of Madison Square Garden stuff.

7:21 So you'd have a dog show on in prime time or the LA Forum. And we, we got out of those deals and I had a very, when I was given the job, I took a vacation. I wrote up 75 page book of what we should be doing and we did a lot of that. To me it was like counterpunching. We knew what the networks were, what they did, and we were going to build a different model. And pay television itself had been discussed and lobbied for. And Sylvester Weaver, Sigourney Weaver's father, who was a big executive, NBC was trying to get paid TV going.

7:58 So this was, you know, a, a, a. It was there when I got there. Chuck Dolan started it, but no one really seemed to have an idea other than secondary programming, meaning movies. It was great that we had movies at that time, movies to bring home, to bring to people. But I didn't think that that could satisfy the the growth of the channel like that. I mean, I do remember one year, I don't know if it was 77, but we had Jaws on in August, I think, and you could have done Jaws 24 hours throughout the day.

8:34 People were loving it, but I was there to create original programming and the first show I ever did was Steve Martin, and it was obviously before the Internet time, but it literally went virtual. I mean, people went crazy for the show. And he toured in our markets because cable wasn't throughout the country at that time. And when he came to New York to do a big tour, finishing concert at Lincoln Center, the people were standing up and doing his act. Like people would get up in a movie music show and sing along with the artist.

9:12 So, you know, I, I, I somewhat could forecast the success. And the idea was to be smarter, more provocative, more interesting, sexier, more mature. I, I wasn't, I didn't believe that, you know, network television controlled by advertising was the ultimate programming. Listen to the history of network programming. And they've done a lot of great things. But you know, I didn't think that was necessarily something that we couldn't challenge. And then from that you eventually launched Cinemax and then you.

9:53 Launched Cinemax became my testifier because I was doing programming very well. I think the company was surprised at the, you know, the early users were entertainment people at the success of of what we were doing. And I think they wanted to test me to see if I could do a cross company kind of meeting or task force that could create another channel and what Cinemax really was because we were competing with Showtime and other people have been looking at the business. It was our fighting brand, meaning that we could go into a market and discount Cinemax to protect HBO and everything.

10:30 And then Cinemax became what people began to call Skinamax because we ended up with a lot of sort of hard R kind of stuff late at night. But we had the license and the privilege to do that. Wow. So, and it's interesting. And then how did multiplexing start? Multiplexing started much later, I think in the early 90s, late 80s. There was always the talk about expanding the pipeline. You know, at one time we had room for HBO and, and no and nobody else could come on. And then there was our competition.

11:08 And then it's slowly cable began to grow. And at some time in the 80s, Reagan passed a law that the cable companies could ride the spine, the backbone of the telephone companies. So all of a sudden we had potential circulation all throughout the country. They were big cities like LA that had no cable. So obviously the amount of circulation was helping us because we needed the revenue. So that that was a big, great breakthrough with us. Someone I'm not long ago wrote a book. They said what saved HBO was The Sopranos.

11:45 I think it was Ronald Reagan and not The Sopranos. Sopranos are good, but they didn't save the network. Right, they came later on Sopranos. So we always along the way, we got boosts. We got boosts from the satellite industry. HBO actually started the satellite industry, but the cable industry was nervous. There was not a very good working relationship with our distributors, with the cable. They they didn't trust us. They always thought because quite honestly it was not the way to be distributed through someone else.

12:21 But so you know, when we brought the satellite in which we would have shared with the cable operator, they were very suspicious, became a secondary business and and became their big competition. So they actually made a mistake, but it added a lot of subscribership and the government protected it. The government made sure that the cable brands could be carried by satellite, which built that business. Right now was multiplexing sort of the the father or grandfather of what's going on now with with streaming?

12:56 Did you are? You, the inventor of, well, streaming. HBO was, you see, Now you see, I believe that HBO was the inventor of streaming because of the scheduling, the no commercials, the the just the whole format. Streaming is HBO blown up on a on an on a high level technology that that's all it is. We did the same things. We just had more personality about who we seriously about what the company was. I, I find the streamers, particularly something like Netflix to be algorithmic. I don't sense that anyone's home there other than buying everything they can get their hands on and stuffing it on the channel.

13:39 So it's the difference between tech people inventing something and entertainment people inventing something. Obviously they use entertainment. Are you going to see the entertainment business swallowed up by the tech business? It is being swallowed up. And one of my concerns is, you know, will it ever be the kind of remarkable business that it was with tech people running it? Because I, I think there's a whole different mentality. Right. Netflix seems to be just a giant computer. Nobody there. Well, I mean, listen.

14:15 They run by. AI, they've done some very good things, but the but I do feel it's algorithmic. They've had, in my opinion, tremendous difficulty making any movies that that, you know, they were going to make so many movies they wouldn't need the, the motion picture business and even the even the, the licensing I love they license as many good old movies as they can, but they market them like they're new. You know, they'll take the artwork like there was a Brad Pitt movie in Tibet and he's the whole movie almost, but you'll see the artwork.

14:50 It'll be a woman. So you'll think it's a completely different movie. So, you know, I, I, I think that HBO had a, a pure, more creative, artistic approach to this. You know, less was more to us. The public remembered the great things, you know, The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, all of that. Not that the channel was stuffed to the, the, you know, to the gills. I think COVID was the greatest free advertising campaign. People were stuck at home and if there was ever a match that being stuck at home, it was streaming where you had choice for 24 hours on a number of channels.

15:37 It was it it, it was an unbelievably fortuitous epidemic or pandemic, right for the streamers. Right. For the streamers and entertainment. So now you were at HBO for many years, you were CEO, head of it, very successful, created all, all new things and then you switched to the Warner Music Group. What what happened there? Why? Why did that? Occur. Well, it was originally supposed to be. It was HBO and Warner's, but once certain factions in the company got very jealous of how it became a little more controversial.

16:14 I didn't want to make a a career out of music, but I had been a music lawyer and I knew my way around the music business. The music company was not in great shape. There was like a civil war going on. So within Time Inc and then Time Warner, I was probably considered the best managing asset. HBO was a unique, you know, very successful country, a company that where the people were happy. I mean, it was really the other people in Time were jealous of it almost. We, we, we put together almost an ideal situation.

16:51 We were able to attract very talented, smart people.

16:56 And I, I was put into music and then it got very controversial, whatever I did in music. And I'm sort of like a large footnote in the rap business that had nothing to do with my career ending there. My career ended there because of that old political struggle. And my struggle was with the CEO and I have been in front of that board too much, doing good things, settling the Viacom multibillion dollar antitrust suit, the USA conflict. But or when we were partners with Paramount and Universal and we had to get out of the deal because we were buying Turner.

17:37 So I ended up at and, and the, the music deal with Interscope. I ended up constantly appearing in front of the board and settling things that the other Time Warner corporate executives couldn't settle. And I think that was not a something that Mister Levin enjoyed watching, although we had been quite close for most of his career until he became CEO. So it isn't that I went home and put needles in him and prayed to be the CEO. In retrospect, I don't think Time Warner or whatever it is now would ever have gone through what it went through with AOL if I had been CEO, and I don't think a lot of people disagree with it.

18:26 Now tell us what happened with the Interscope thing and the gangsta rap and and what led to your difficulties there? You have to get rid of that. Right. I mean, somewhat literally the first day I took that job, two people, Dolores, there was a black woman and Bill Bennett's brother, Robert Bennett's brother, Bill, I think Brett Bennett did all the big book contracts in Washington for the politicians. They became this sort of Salem witch hunters and came after us. The the whole music business was doing right because Death row was part of our Interscope deal.

19:12 1000 Music labeled Death Row. Yes, and the company panicked a little bit. I remember Levin wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal about First Amendment. This was not a First Amendment. We were not the government. I remember I called Madonna Cos I didn't want to create a, a, you know, a, a push back in the music business. And I, and she said to me, she said, listen, I have the same trouble in maverick. I have to turn down some music that comes in. It's too crazy. I said, listen, we're maverick but bigger.

19:47 I have, I have the same issue. But the board insisted that it be sold. In fact, there was a woman, Carla Hills, who was Bush's trade representative, who was on the board said sell it for nothing if you have to. So I don't think so anyway. The the. Sale process was a little nasty and I knew that the joint venture was very much in favor of Interscope, but they were acting like, Oh my God, and I think they already had a deal. And what was happening is we were paying all of the price, all of the cost and getting half of the revenue.

20:25 And our other labels didn't like that. They were competing against Interscope, but Interscope was getting a better deal. So, you know, listen, we finally got out of the deal. But in that process, you know, you know, the, the Interscope people were not very happy, although I don't think they were really mistreated. And now I'm slipping on a name. But Jimmy, Doctor Dre and and and one of the Interscope guys that invented the they're now billionaires from Apple. But he became the symbol of what was wrong with me and I tried to go.

21:06 Iovine. Jimmy Ivine and I tried to go see Suge Knight, who was in charge of death row and that was a very funny episode because he never showed up. Jimmy was taking him around to every delicate test and so he couldn't meet with me. And that was in a HBO did a three parter on the rap business and that was sort of a part of it. So I I liked the the music business and it keeps you young And the night we open the Rock and roll Hall of Fame, which was many Warner people were very much involved. Not not me before my time and HBO did the television show and that was a weekend.

21:49 It happened to be a beautiful weekend in Cleveland to me walking around backstage with the Hall of Fame of artists. And I got to do that also at We Are the World because HBO did the We Are the World cuts, which I think may have been some 2, two of the few greatest nights in the history of rock'n'roll. So whatever happened, I think my, certainly my career in a way was cut short, but I, I, I certainly had, you know, a great time and, and actually, that was the philosophy at HBO in a way. We wanted our people.

22:30 If they were good, they were going to get rewarded. They got paid better than everyone else. They got the travel. Sometimes we would take people like a lawyer who never worked on a show and take them to South Africa to see Whitney Houston so they could be felt part of it. And I think that, listen, it's like any other business. Happy people make a Better Business than unhappy people. We had very happy people and that was a big concern of mine. I managed down better than I managed up. So did you say Madonna was conservative about what type of music was?

23:04 No, no, no. I'm just saying that you're always going to listen. You're it's a public company, but it's not the government. You're entitled to choose what movies you want to put out, what songs you want to put out. You know, the, the listen. I never thought rap was such a threat to society. You know, I think it was a little overestimated. To hear Carla Hills talk about rap was a waste of my time. But you live in a big corporation and you sometimes have to do things you don't like to do. Right now, after you got rid of Interscope, were you fearful a little bit about your safety for a while?

23:48 There was one in the weekend of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I had bodyguards. There was a rumor that shook Knight, who had been linked to other rather difficult several deaths. He's in jail now. Right, Yes, yes, or I wouldn't be talking about him. I can tell you so. But I managed to survive and and. Wow, so you had people protecting you for a while? I, I think unless you're maybe the president is I think bodyguards are overrated. They didn't seem to. I didn't think it would have been hard to get me if someone really wanted me.

24:36 Right now, tell us about the the rise of home video also and and satellite and selling foreign rights. How did that make HBO an extremely profitable? Well, listen, we we, you know, HBO had a long struggle to get very prep by the time AT&T bought it. It was the gem in in the company, although they didn't know what to do with it. But you know, the things we did were things the television companies do, you know, you do. We did more Co productions now that you see streaming in a company like Netflix, which has so much foreign material.

25:17 I think I knew all along that America was not the only company a country with good television. We had people in London, we had people in looked in Scandinavia and Israel. We took a lot of programming. So you know, we we were conscious of doing Co productions around the world with partners and and that was something the networks didn't do much of. And we were always sensitive to in a sense disting us, disting us ourself from the network, putting out a different product in the network. There were several times along the way because we had Vanguard viewers, which is sometimes a good for advertisers that, and we, at least when I was there, I think there may be some advertising now on HBO and the streamer.

26:07 I, I, I always turn down advertising. I mean it, it isn't the matter of what the revenue flow is that advertisers have a, a direct or indirect cultural effect on what you do. I didn't want to be sensitive. There was anything in this business, in the television side of the business that you wanted to be free and that was to me was pay television. So we, we never ran into that, which was a blessing. It was it was great. And the parent company, because they were a publishing company. They really believed their last organization, I think that believed in the separation of church and state.

26:41 We in the very early days of HBO, we did a, a series with Consumer Reports and they did hair bleach and one of the, one of the drug companies had like 67% of the hair bleach company hair bleach business. And they went to Andrew High School who was the CEO, a great CEO at Time Inc at the time. He said, listen, I can't do anything. We don't interfere. We don't interfere with the magazines, we don't interfere with HBO. So it was, it was a great atmosphere and being in this publishing company when I came home from a crazy week in California and go to a board meeting and then have reporters from Time magazine talking about the elections.

27:25 I mean, it was really almost like Nirvana in terms of the experience, so. Now, you had an interview with Charlie Rose back in 1992 where you discussed that media was actually shaping society at that time. So that was a early prediction of, of what's happening now more and more. Well, it's not media so much today, it's technology. It's not that I wouldn't call that media, but you know something I I never I I was always thinking, does media influence society or it's a society influence it it goes back and forth.

28:08 For instance, in the streaming business, there have been so many multi episode, you know, shows based on American business. Some of you know, some of them like Succession and those who are thin, the Murdoch family, but billionaire billions, But some of the other ones are based on actual, you know, the, the, you know, the, the, the drug that the Purdue family did, you know, the, the everyone. There were two or three miniseries based on that. So in a sense, media was following society, following the business world.

28:53 But then I can remember when Reagan was president, I used to think that the most socially relevant people were the comedians. They were the only ones really speaking out and, and you know, so it, it bounces back and forth. I think we're in a period right now where this is not the open America that we that I grew up in. People are very careful. Look what's happening to the deals at the media companies, the universities, all of that. So this is, you know, I have whatever I grew up with and whatever took place.

29:27 This is a whole new ball game. Which I don't know, Things are are changing rapidly. How did the Time Warner mergers in 1989 and then the Ted Turner deal in 1995 affect HBO? And how were you involved in? Those well, we were the biggest entertainment entity at time. And then when Time Warner came, Warner was bigger than us. So it didn't, it, it was, it was quite a conflict because I, I believed, I really did believe in, in, in, in, you know, the synergy of these assets. So I remember we had a big meeting down in the Caribbean in Lyford Key and you know, I'm at Erdogan and all these feels great.

30:14 I, I love being in a company with all of these people. And we were never really able to get, I think of all the companies that were least willing to act that way, the studio and then the studios in Hollywood at the time, now they're under tremendous pressure, were treated like kingdoms. You know, they were, they were the top of the food chain and Warner's had a gigantic library that they wouldn't, they weren't using. And I remember once we made a remake of a Warner movie, The 50 Foot Woman with Darrell Ann.

30:44 And it was a big success for us. So we wanted to go through all of their old black and white stuff. We wanted to do House of Wax and and they shut it off. And I think they shut it off because of me, because because the heads of the company, Terry Semmel and and and Bob Daly felt some kind of rivalry with me that if there was any cloud and the horizon, it was me. So that was the the relationship there. Even negotiating deals to buy Warner movies. And when we went foreign, we did HBO Asia, HBO, LA.

31:22 And the studio that was the most difficult was Warner's, our own sister studio. And when I became head of music and HBO, they went crazy because the West Coast said to them, no, no, you guys are not the heir apparent. The heir apparent's in New York. And they, they had a, they had a hissy fit. As usual, jealousy and envy. Never appears in a corporation. Right, right. That, that's fascinating. What about the Ted Turner deal in 95 were you involved in? That it was much earlier than 95 it. Was earlier.

32:03 Oh, you mean the acquisition? We were, I was on the board of Turner for a while. We were part owners. The cable industry was in it, but we bought the whole thing in 90. What happened in 95? I had gotten the music job and I was in the middle of the Interscope sale and the Turner thing closed and they came to New York for the big press conference and I didn't get there till late because I was in the middle of that deal. So what had happened is I heard, I heard from out West in after the Sun Valley thing, there was a meeting with Mike Milken and Jerry Levin and Turner and even Tom Brokaw was there.

32:39 And all of a sudden I was getting congratulations because I was now going to take over Turner to Ted was going to be the chairman, I was going to be the CEO. I just got into music. You know, I felt like I was being moved around like a piece of furniture. Now, if I had to go to Atlanta, I wouldn't have been very happy. But so the word sort of crept out that I was, you know, negative towards the deal. It wasn't negative towards the deal. I liked it. And Turner and I became great friends in the beginning, since I was the only other programmer but him on the board.

33:10 There was this kind of rivalry and then we became fantastic friends. I love Ted. He's a good guy. Yeah, he's a great guy. I mean, I say this, but I say it in a nice way. Ted's half a Jackass, but he could get away with it more than and half a genius. I mean, America, I went to, I went to spring training with him and he would, he had a terrible team and he would just tell them they were terrible. You're the most expensive, terrible team. And they would laugh, you know so. Yeah, now he lost a lot of money eventually in that deal and lost his power too.

33:48 Well, Levin kicked him out too. And I used to say to people, isn't it amazing that the least talented guy in the company gets to kick out the most talented people? I said, there's something wrong with that. You know, I don't know if Caligula did that in Rome, but who knows? Wow, so you're not a fan of Gerald? Levin, Well, he has since passed away. But listen, that company, starting with the AOL deal, it was the biggest media company in the world. And they, they really, you know, we're seeing it today.

34:27 There's more people running entertainment companies who are not really entertainment people. They're finance people. Levin really was not an entertainment person. He was almost like an administrative person. I would liken him to Stalin. Stalin only understood the administration. Stalin knew enough to have, you know Trotsky out of town when he did. Who? Who's the founder of the Soviet Union? Lennon. Lennon. When Lennon died, it wasn't like Trotsky could jump a plane. So Stalin has the the funeral and there's no Trotsky, so everyone's feeling Trotsky's boycotting.

35:14 Trotsky was Lenin's favorite, so he was a great corporate manipulator. Stalin, he wasn't the smartest man in Russia. And Jerry, within time, he kept manipulated himself out. Nick Nicholas, who had been ahead of him, Jerry was involved in the in the, in the corporate murder there corporate murder. Well, Nick was, you know, sort of murdered out of murdered out of the company. And he was certainly more talented than Jerry was by far. So, you know, corporations are interesting creatures. There's a you could make the argument, you see, I was not so interested in acquiring wealth.

36:00 I wanted the biggest canvas to work on. That was my I said, if I can change television in the world, which we did to some extent, that's happy for me. That's, that's what I want. But many people in corporations, it takes a lot more guts to be an entrepreneur to build your own thing. So people in corporations, it's, it's comfy. It's you can get by without ever saying yes, you know, so I sometimes not the best talent rises to the top. And that's not a I'm not telling a new story. Sounds like A Game of Thrones within Time Warner.

36:40 Well, it's in, it's in a, it's in a lot of kids. It happens in a lot of corporations. Right. I mean, there are some big corporations in this country that I've worked with that are dumb as a hair on a thick, as a hair on a dog's back. I mean, they, they are, you know, you're, you're amazed at what the, what the management is in these companies. But some of them are still highly successful, even though they're not apparently that smart. Although it's getting more competitive. So you know, you could say the American auto business, for instance, has not been the smartest business and they're, you know, are they successful?

37:20 You know, not as much as they should and not compared to other auto companies. And at one time, not that I'm a fan of of Musk, but at one time Tesla stock was worth more than all of the American auto companies. Come on. I think it still is and today it went up I think $12.00 or something. Because of this contract or something? I'm not sure why it went up today, but it did go a lot. It's a real conflict for some of us Tesla owners. Are you a Tesla? Owner. It's not stock owner. I'm a car owner. Really.

37:55 How do you like it? It's the X is a great car, but I, I, I listen as consumers in America, that's the only power we have, right? I, I think what the little bit of time that Musk spent in the government was so harmful and he's so crazy, you know, why? Why should you endorse his product, you know? So why do you? Probably get sued at least five times from this show. Don't worry about it. I'll protect it. I'll get my team of lawyers help. Yeah. So why did you buy a Tesla if you're not a Musk fan? Because I was, I'm an, I'm sensitive to the environment.

38:34 If you talk the talk, you walk the walk. I believe in electric cars and I believe the shutdown of electric cars is going to hurt us so much technologically because in China, for instance, all of those people now are inventing great chips. They start on electric cars. That's the progression. We're shutting down everything because it's viewed as democratic. It's it's so stupid that Democratic Party, we're shutting down all the pathways. And that's the way since World War Two, we have led this world in science experimentation.

39:07 If anything was invented in World War Two, we broke the codes. The English did too. I mean, you know, right and, and that ability is being shut down and the long term effects of that I, I, I can't even calculate. I think it's a temporary shutdown and I think it it will prevail eventually. Today, Ford announced that they're coming out with a new electric car. I'm not just talking about electric cars. Yeah. Just our agencies were not politicized. This, this is not what this show was about. So. We've got till midnight and people are watching, so not a problem now.

39:46 You predicted convergence of of cable and Internet a long, long time ago. I think you might be the first person who. I'm not sure I can claim that, but what I did say, because I was in the music business at the time, I saw technology enter the music business, right? And it it was not a positive development for the music business. For the consumer it was good because you could buy a single and you didn't have to buy an album. Right. And initially people were stealing them from. But I also thought at the time that it wouldn't stop at music.

40:29 And, you know, I sort of having gone through with the cable industry predicting 500 channels and, and we talked about all of, of what could happen. I understood that if the power of, of, of technology and, and computing and everything got into the video business, got into the picture business, that it would have an enormous impact. Some of IT channels meant more, you know, more variety, more opportunity, more jobs. But if you what we did was we developed technical companies that are so rich and so powerful that they start to spread their ownership and start to take over other businesses.

41:15 Right now you've worked with many people. You mentioned some executives and and celebrities. Who are some of your favorite collaborators that that you work with, both from a business perspective as well as entertainment? Well, early on in in my career, Steve Martin show was a singular. It was almost like it was like if you were a rookie quarterback trying out in the first game. You go out playing, you throw 4 touchdowns. Doing Steve Martin first was beyond the reaction was beyond what anyone. How did you recognize that he had that ability to do that?

41:53 You know something, We had the choice of another comedian, a sort of old time comedian or used to, to open up for Sinatra. And I knew that Steve on the West Coast had a very hip reputation. So I said to myself, listen, I want this channel to be hip. It doesn't. I don't need a lounge comedian so. You want Buddy Hackett. No, no, I like Buddy Hackett. No, no, this guy was no Buddy Hackett. But Steve was, you know, had a little bit of a hot reputation. And I had, I saw him before he went on on HBO. He was on Saturday Night Live and he was in a white suit and we were shooting a different kind of show.

42:30 And I remember we told Steve, you know, you're you're a white guy in a white suit. I remember he did the he did the show that night in a brown suit. But he was so funny. And I was, you know, I sat through a lot of the editing and now I'm, I'm afraid to give a #50 some odd years later. Whatever it is, I swear I can still do his act like he's a. Crazy guy. I can still do some of the pieces from his act right. He's Bette Midler was a great show. She was the perfect kind of entertainer for us. You know, listen, we got people who were not afraid to appear but didn't like to do.

43:15 We got Carly Simon out of retirement who shot her on Martha's Vineyard. Streisand didn't like doing concerts. We ended up shooting Streisand 3 times and a lot of the comedians were afraid of giving away their material. Some of the old timers had like 56 minutes, but we got just almost, I mean, you could count on one hand the comedians we didn't get we, we got everyone. Did you do Rodney Dangerfield? We did Rodney maybe 6-7 times. We did everybody. George Carlin 1213 times may Rest in peace. So and it it was fun for me and it was a learning experience.

43:55 In the beginning. I would go on the road, exec produce the shows, watch the money, learn, learn the business. And it it was if you're lucky enough to get involved in a startup business, a successful startup business, it's one of the great thrills. And I remember I bought a ping pong table and people come in and we played ping pong and worked on the weekend. And Steve Martin had a line where he's playing the banjo and then he says that I get paid for doing this. That became a theme inside HBO, that people love their work so much that we would look at each other and say, I get paid for doing this.

44:38 Wow, getting paid for having a good time I. Probably should have written. I think HBO was an interesting company. Probably should have written a book about 25 years ago. Yeah, it's it's never too late. Tell us about boxing. You HBO kind of owned boxing for a while. Which, which fights did you have? Which famous fights? Well, we had we are all Sugar Ray Leonard's with Marvin Hagler, Larry Holmes. They would before I got there. They did Ali in in Asia. I forget which Ali which that George Foreman, probably the Rumble in the Jungle and Tyson became.

45:17 We were having a heavyweight tournament because Larry Holmes had retired. And I looked at it and it wasn't the greatest set of the fighters. And I heard because Cus d'amato, Floyd Patterson came from New York, from Mount Vernon. I came from Mount Vernon and Cus D'amato was his trainer and they were up in Albany and Tyson was at 17, was building this reputation. So I said to our guys, I said by the time we get this tournament done, this guy could come in and probably beat our guy, right? So we spent like, he had very good managers.

45:49 We spent like 48 hours getting him into the tournament and that's Tyson emerged as the youngest heavyweight champ ever and we were involved with him for a very long time until Don King ruined his career. So although we did business with King, but. Did you have the fight where he bit off the ear? Yes, we did. Yeah. Wow. With a van to Hollowfield? Yeah, I'm not sure he bit off the whole ear. Just part of it. I was at the fight when the guy took the the the flew into the ring. You know, I listen, as a kid, I went to Patterson Johansson.

46:28 I, I was, you know, very into that stuff. That's great. Now you were a mentor to lots of people and, for example, Jeff Beukes, who eventually succeeded you. How did you build such great teams at HBO? And even after you left, it continued to get bigger and better. HBO had a very good reputation. At one point we were the most popular with Nbas coming into the way that we were loaded with Nbas. I mean, it was a very good place to work. And I would like to think that they're still using the blueprints that were submitted in the very beginning, you know, distinctive programming.

47:15 I mean, I think there's a term, it's not elitist programming. There's a there's some kind of term for upper class television now that really started with HBO. I just had a vision that you had to do something different than the networks and that you could make more intelligent, provocative programming without it being so elitist that you wouldn't find an audience. And I I never really paid attention to traditional advertising, which traditional research, which is what advertisers need. I was more concerned that what the audience felt about us.

47:52 So I wanted to know if they rejected we, we was sort of, you know, you could say that we were somewhat like liberal in terms of the areas we like. We weren't afraid of sexual content. We weren't afraid of anything. And I watched that very carefully and, and never got any really negative feedback. And we did get it across to the audience that, that we were more experimental, we were more of an adventure and we were more and, and we did things networks did 22 episodes. If we liked something, it was 6 episodes.

48:25 We did the six episodes. I, I probably got more, you know, I followed British television more than I followed us in terms of structuring and, and, and everything. So, and, and it, it went over it, it went over quite well. And also at that time, it's hard to even characterize network television now, but it was more network television was more women's because of the advertising, you know, laundry soaps and, and I decided that HBO should be more men. Boxing and, and theatrical movies were more men.

49:04 You know a man invited a woman to the movie in those days. Right. So, you know, I had a very early on and I almost think it's serendipitous that I, I just had a very good clear vision of what HBO should be. And I guess you would say if I was a fighter, I'd be a counter puncher. And I we counter punched the networks, whatever, you know, if they did something so fantastically well, we stayed away from it. I didn't want to do anything that we couldn't do at a higher quality. We spent more money on our movies.

49:39 We won all the Emmys. I wanted the concerts to look fantastic because the audience was used to feature motion pictures, which is the top of the line from a production point of view. So I didn't want our programming or anything to look cheap. I wanted it to look We wouldn't do it unless it looked better and was better than what anyone else did. Now we didn't do as much. Right. But we developed a model that you were allowed to repeat, and the program was worth repeating. And theatrical movies took up a, you know, in the early days, the licensing fights between the studios and HBO were the biggest money fights in the entertainment business.

50:21 So we, you know, we, we, we. Were concerned with quality and your customer rather than just quantity like Netflix. Yeah, and, and we succeeded at that. And you know, I, I was even, you know what I used to do, we would get complaints from customers and every time I had like a gap or 1/2 hour, I said, bring me bring me 10 complaints. And I would call people in small towns who had complained. Wow. And say I'm, I'm the CEO of the company. You know, I think you're right. I think we, you know, I would have a real and I did it in small towns because I figured the word would spread in the 2nd and it won't say that C CEO of HBO called me.

51:06 And so we, we were, you know, I, I think we were, we were a smart company. And, and when we did, when we decided to do all these hotel deals around the across the, have you ever driven across country? Small parts. It's like an HBO advertisement. Every marquee and you know, I look back and I wonder if we ever took goodwill on our books because it was a fantastic advertising. We did moderately successful blanket deals with all of it. But, but if you threw on the, the, the effect of all of that advertising, like every hotel is holding out that it has HBO.

51:47 And so we did. And then multi casting was Showtime had decided to do a mini pay and my guys got panicky and I said, no, no, no, no. And usually I, I, you know, we were usually on the same page. I said, now I'm over ruling everybody. We're the king. We want more real estate. We don't want less because if the cable operator gets a mini pay, he'll say, Hey, I'll leverage the big guy or I'll drop the big guy. Don't, don't give them a cheaper alternative. And I took three of the smartest people in the company and I said go to work on it.

52:25 And they invented multicasting and it changed the whole cable industry. Everyone eventually multicasted. And then the next step became, you know, streaming, obviously. Right. It evolved to that. Now, how did you convince talents like Carlin and and Bette Midler and Robin Williams and you mentioned Steve Martin to come on HBO and nobody had ever done that before. This was because. We were straight ahead place. There was no censorship. You know, if you have a comedian on and tell them not to use bad language, they're only speaking with half their language.

53:04 It wasn't just a matter of cursing or anything like that. But we were, and we were very good at talent relations. We really took you. We hired a guy named Art Podavis, who no longer is alive and from NBC, and he was a fantastic talent person. And we had, I had very good relations with the talent. I remember someone told me that Steve Ross used to say Michael Fuchs would be my successor because he knows what to do with talent. So we had a very good reputation and also we were doing good material.

53:34 So it attracted talent and they got paid well. And I, I think some of that, I mean, I don't follow it as closely as I did then. And I, I've been reading in the trades that maybe HBO doesn't pay as well as it used to. But you know, listen, things have changed and HBO, I just had trouble figuring out what to call themselves, which I think is the most ridiculous marketing thing I've seen since you could combine New Coke and insulin. This was crazier. So I, I don't know. I mean, unfortunately Max, HBO Max is not one of the top two or three where it should have been and maybe could have been, but that's not my job anymore.

54:25 Right now, you also had a phone conversation with Marlon Brando, right? And you developed. AI had a phone relationship with Marlon Brando that has one of the things I had the most fun with, one of the things he used to do. He would answer in a woman's voice, a different woman's voice all the time. Really it took me about 5. Never heard this. Before, it took me about five times to figure it out, and then I tried it and I listen. He's one of the greatest actors. So part of part of acting is voice.

54:59 And I couldn't fool one person one time trying to talk like a woman. So, so I hadn't. And I remember once I was flying out to the Hamptons and it was the smaller days, the airport, Long Island Air. And I get off the plane and, you know, Brando to most of us is still a God. And the woman from Long Island Air comes running out. She was Michael Fuchs. Like, I go like this. She says, Marlon Brando's on the phone. It's urgent. Oh, he's calling it. We were before cell phones. And I'm coming down the ramp and I go like this God, he's such a pain in the ass.

55:38 I just, I don't even want to talk.

55:42 When I got fired, he left a message on my answering box, answering machine that we used to have. That was those jerks, those and I. At some point in time, we did an electronic thing in my house and modernized, and that box got lost. Never. I've regretted that to hear Marlon Brando sing your praises and talk about the industry. That would be awesome if you had that right. That's amazing. What were the conflicts at Warner Music about that that really kind of ended that and and finished your. Well, you know.

56:33 Situation there. It's funny, the music Business Today or then even then, it's not like the executives were great A&R people. They had become sort of executives, you know, and in the morning they waited to hear what David Geffen said or somebody was such a gossipy. You know, at least in the television movie business, you have to read scripts and you have to collaborate. So I'd speak to some of the guys who were, you know, high up in the company and they I'd say, well, Pat is the court. Depends if we got hits.

57:09 If we got hits, we got hits. We need. There was no, it, it, you know, it, it was, I guess you could say it's a more democratic business. You know, it doesn't matter what your education is or anything like that. Anyway, I'm not exactly sure how it started, but there was a feud within the business. The guy who ran the business had had worked for one of the governors in New York, a guy named Bob. OK, I'm doing a disservice here. But, and he was a great administrator and, but but not a music guy. And then there was a a bit of a rebellion under him.

57:50 And Levin went in and split the company in half, which it was like making a civil war. And then he decided this, that OK, this isn't working, you're going to take over the company. So when I came in on the first day, it was a little bit like a civil war and I, I didn't, I didn't listen. I had worked as a music lawyer. I'd worked at the, you know, in the tour business at, at William Morris. It was one of the areas that I worked on and working with, doing contracts for the groups. But I wasn't a born, the music people are almost like born into music that that's what they do.

58:28 They stay. So they in the television business, there was there seemed to be more loyalty to the company and the music business was loyalty to your contract, you know, So it was far less disciplined and a little crazier. And quite honestly, the music business had a much more of a criminal background. There'd been, there'd been much more opportunity to be dishonest in the music business. So you have to worry about that all the time. I remember it at Time Warner. If there was like a questionable expense of someone who used the plane, they'd say put it, book it out of music because no one agreement.

59:03 So so I walked into a very hostile environment and I'm I'm not a blushing Violet, you know, I'm, I think I'm capable of running companies. And it got very confrontational. And then the rap thing hit. One thing after. Another yeah. And I was firing people the, the company was, you know, the company was not doing what it should have been doing. And it just got a little bit crazy. But that really had nothing to do with my career there. That was, you can't say Michael got fired because of music. In fact, I, he is now no longer with us.

59:44 But I had secretly gone and hired Jerry Moss, who was the founder, one of the families of A&M, to come in and be my successor. You know, first start on the West Coast with Warner, Warner Brothers Music, which was one of the most prestigious labels in all of the business. And then to take over the Jerry was already a financially totally independent guy. So I had a scheme in which to recreate the company. But that didn't matter. It, it was purely Levin and me.

1:00:20 And I remember reading in Time magazine, our own magazine, late in the summer. And of course, Time Warner feels they have to take care of the Michael Fuchs problem. Wow, that's our own magazine. I think I have a problem. Right, right. So there were disputes with Jerry Levin. That was the problem. Now, I heard that you turned down the Seinfeld show. Is that is that? Correct, I did. Are you sorry about that? Well, first of all, it wasn't really an HBO show because Jerry would not allow any obscenity out of his mouth.

1:00:59 I, I didn't want just dirty shows. But it was sort of, you know, and in the beginning, the show was not Jerry came out in front of the red curtain. And it, it, it took a long time to get tracked. Yeah, it took a couple of years. So Castle. Rock was involved. Rob Reiner sent it to me and I looked at it and we had just started the Gary Shanley Show, which was a real breakthrough kind of show. I didn't want our, you know, separate program, our sitcoms or our to be all comedians or something. You know, I wanted to branch out more than that.

1:01:37 So they had done 4 episodes. NBC had turned it down and they sent it to me and I turned it down, and Brandon Tartikoff picked up the four as a favor, and it took about four years for them to get traction, and then they took off. So when I was at HBO, I didn't watch any network programming. I didn't want to be polluted by the network programming. And then when I left, I began to watch Seinfeld and I loved it. I mean, it was absolutely fantastic and still is, right. So I guess in retrospect, I, I think we would have tried to make a little bit more of a provocative show out of it.

1:02:24 But you know, I mean, we had Jerry as a stand up. I knew him. I remember I had my kids with me at a show and he'd come up and say, oh, your father's done it. And I go here and you know, we did every comedian we did. But it is. I mean, to see its popularity even today after all that time is extraordinary. Yeah, I still watch it often. It's now we were indirectly involved with Friends because Dream On was done by the people who eventually did Friends. Oh, really? And I thought they were terrific and I didn't want to lose them.

1:03:03 So the show was produced by Universal, but then Paramount got a look at it, so there was going to be some competition for the producers. So I went to Les Moonves at Warner's at the time and I said, you know, have you seen Dream On? He said no. I said, we'll take a look at those people are very good. And it ends. So I said to him, listen, Les, I all I want is one year with them as our advisors. They don't have to completely produce the show. There were three of them, but I want to keep the show going.

1:03:40 So it turns out Les gets them screws me on the deal. And that show made him because he then sold it to Warner Brothers from from NBC and from Warner's he then eventually ended up at. But that's how he got his reputation, because it was such a big show. He eventually wound up at CBS, I think. Right. Yeah, he did. I mean, but he sold that. He sold the show from Warner's to NBC. And, you know, we were the progenitors of that show. Wow, so you could have had. So we had, we had, listen, we ended up finally going into some kind of network stuff.

1:04:23 We didn't have enough money to do heavy deficiting, but we did Everyone Loves Raymond, which was with, with David Letterman's company that and and that show made it a ton of money. So I would like to say that we had some pretty good tastes even if we moved outside of our, you know, base business. Right now, you've mentioned a lot of celebrities and executives. No, no. You mentioned the celebrities. Well, you know, we, we both kind of talked about them do. We talk about this when I'm getting an exam.

1:04:56 Is that how you got this information? From I did some research for a few minutes, have you had any interactions with celebrities or executives that aren't publicly available that you want to tell us? What do you want me to out some people or something? Well, you know, tell us some. Interesting. I listen. I didn't. We've got 10s of millions of people watching. This program, I didn't work with everyone, but I worked with them. I mean, I'll tell you, some of the most fun I had in the beginning was when I went to Paris and did every in Las Vegas and did every girly show.

1:05:33 It was a giant for us on television, I think really. No, it was to go to Paris and hang out all day with naked women on a stage. You know, it's, I mean, when I was at William Morris, I had I think a $25 expense account which allowed you maybe to take a taxi back and forth. And immediately when I went to HBO, I mean, I remember sitting at the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel and there were the, the papers used to love in California in the front page to show the, the snowstorms in the East. There's always Buffalo.

1:06:11 Buffalo had 41 inches today. And I'd be sitting at the pool living at a great hotel. And I, I would say to myself, you get paid for doing this. I mean, you know, there was such a change just in, in treatment of people and I, I had a lot to do with that. I mean, the HBO people lived. I, I told them this, if we succeed, you will live better. You get paid better than all your friends in the rest of the business. I was head of the compensation committee at Turner. And let me tell you, my people got paid a lot and treated a lot better.

1:06:44 And I freed the slaves and down, down in Turner. So you created and then you enjoyed it. That's great. Yeah. But it was, you know, it was incentive and, and, and everyone then wanted to work for HBO. And, and, you know, if you've talked to my generation, the people were there about their time at HBO, not the time in their life, their time at HBO. They say it was the best time they ever had. Wow, that's great. Nothing better than that. Didn't have trouble recruiting people. Speaking of celebs and execs, what do you think about cancel culture?

1:07:16 I don't, you know, listen, on the sex front, you know, this has been a long time coming. As a former lawyer, it happens usually without a trial or something. In some of the more serious cases, it's been a trial. But I, I personally, I, I know Woody Allen and I feel badly that I think it was the HBO documentary that sank him because he cleared inspection in New York State, cleared it in Connecticut. I know some of the inside stuff there. And, and it is, you know, it's, it is not just, it's not, I do not believe that he really did anything that called for this.

1:08:04 And we are forgetting that he is one of our greatest film makers. And I felt that was an example of a serious breach in that cancel culture. And listen, I don't know a better system unless it's so severe. Listen, he in a sense went to court. He did and and not convicted some of the higher level guys like Weinstein and P Diddy and stuff. They they got to go to court and didn't work out so well. But and then it's, you know, now we have a different environment and a lot of that has sort of gone away.

1:08:44 So you look back on it. It's a strange chapter. Right. Did you work? You mentioned Weinstein. Did you work with him at all? We used to work with, I've, I've worked with Harvey. It wasn't my favorite person to work with. I was on the board of IMAX twice and I ended up in a situation where the CE OS that were joint CE OS couldn't in a sense, Bruce Wasserstein, who is no longer with us, own control of the company. It was a public company and he decided to bring Harvey in to do all the programming, which was a ridiculous idea.

1:09:19 And the CEOs couldn't fight it. So they turned to me. I was on the board and they said we want you to represent us and go up against Harvey. And we had certain rights as board members. And I was the one that went up against Harvey and, and, and got rid of the issue. And there was 1 funny episode that I just, it's a little too crazy to talk about. Yeah. You can tell us. No, no, it's, I know. I know it's OK for me to talk about it, but you wouldn't talk about it if you were me, All right? So I, I listen.

1:09:51 I I, I knew it. You have to respect Harvey for what he did. Certainly in the beginning, he read, he made good movies. And then he got drunk and they began to make big movies. And then everything went crazy over there. So, you know, it's a, it's a seductive business, so you got to stay strapped in a little bit. Right. So where do you think things are headed in the next 5 or 10 years in entertainment, streaming, things like that? Unfortunately, I think streaming has pretty much crushed the entertainment business as we do it.

1:10:27 The Bible in the entertainment business was something called Windows, the theatrical window, the pay-per-view window or the OR the OR the not the pay-per-view window, but the DVD window, the pay-per-view window, paid television window. So this this seven layer cake is what kept everyone alive in this business, kept network alive, kept us everyone and streaming has come in and basically crushed it and streaming is not making the same kind of money in its totality. It was that all of these businesses, the cable business, the content business, I'm not talking about the ISP business, but the content business of of cable is is been crushed.

1:11:16 Network is the network business is nothing like what it was

1:11:23 certainly pay-per-view and all of that. I mean it really I, I've never seen quite a financial analysis of what it was at its heights compared to what it is now. You can almost look at the record business, what technology did to the, to the record business. The record business doesn't make nearly the IT, it, it's in Time Warner, it was the best cash on cash business and now it's a touring business which the record companies can't control. So it's been flattened out and I and I do believe that these institutions behaving properly with the right motivation helped America become the entertainment kings and the spread all around the world and told the American story.

1:12:06 And I think they're under jeopardy and there's too many financial people running entertainment companies. The two do not mix. I, I understood HB OS finances very well, but I'm not a finance person. That's not my mentality. My first look at the entertainment business as a creative look at the entertainment business. I know how to run a business that that I'm OK at. But when I see these people come out of the financial world and their decisions really are totally, you know, you know, I know there is no business like show business, but there's some truth to that.

1:12:42 It's rather unique. It's not a tire business and the tech business is, you know, efficiency in the tech business is getting rid of people. When an Amazon can say our AI project, we can get rid of 15,000 people. Like they deserve a reward. And in the entertainment business, if they think that AI is going to be able to just about replace everything and who cares about people, you know, they'd rather have a robot in a supermarket than have to deal with someone that that may be an HR problem. That may be a pay problem.

1:13:16 But, and I'm not comparing a supermarket to the entertainment business, but unfortunately this is not a temp. You know, I think we were talking a little politics. You said, oh, it'll come back. Not in my lifetime and not in your lifetime. And the entertainment business is not going to rejuvenate itself. It is permanently damaged. I have a son who is working his way through that business and I'm very concerned to the point where we have pretty much decided to try to try to to go into the sports business, which happens to be because it's a perishable business.

1:13:55 You know, NFL football's the probably the most valuable franchise entertainment franchise in the world because it's a perishable business and it and, and it, it has an upper hand. Tech cannot duplicate a football game no matter what they think they can do they think robots playing football, let them try it. So I would like my son to be in the in the sports business because it's growing and he is in California and it is depressing and I mean depressing at every level. As a friend of mine's daughter, I got her her first job working for Marty Scorsese on Mean St. She became one of the best production designers at 50.

1:14:36 She is completely out of work, no job and she's she was a star and that you can you can go around and hear that story writers in Hollywood every the business has been shrunken and I listen at home. I'm glad to have streaming because it's rare that I can't find something. Although I've watched so much television or movies in my life, I think I'm running out of options. I've been watching since I'm seven years old. Yeah, it's, it's interesting because AI will do the writing. They're creating AI characters.

1:15:13 They look like. Humans Some actors and actresses have signed deals where they give the studio the right to create. Well, some of them will also sued. I I don't know if you should be signing deals. That's not a good summer. Signing deals, yeah, give me a few 1,000,000 bucks and you can do whatever you want. Listen, I believe that there is magic in that business, and the magic comes from the magic in some people. The process is interesting. It's a collaborative process and tech to me, you know, listen, Bill Gates said it, he's disappointed with the he was a pioneer and he said, you know, we thought that distributing information on an efficient, inexpensive basis was fantastic.

1:15:56 The leadership in the tech business is quite disgusting in my opinion. And I think that the, the weaponization of the tech business, whether it be politics or AI or whatever is going to happen.

1:16:15 You know, I bet no one has made a count of how many small businesses have shut down and stores have been shut down, whether it's through Amazon or whatever. But the sake of the livelihood of this country, I think it's it's, you know, my, my niece was very high up in the Justice Department under Obama and all of these campaign things the trade agreements are taking away. John Tech was the by far the number one situation that was taking jobs away. So I just wonder just not about the entertainment.

1:16:53 The entertainment company companies happen to be right now an example of of what Tech has done. It is flattened and, and ended 100 years or 75 years of of growth and the same thing in the record business that did exactly the same thing. The record business was an incredibly lucrative creative business. And it's been, you know, I don't know what percentage of revenue has disappeared. They had a touring business and a record business. They hardly have a record business now. So I listened when you said I recognized something about the merger between tech and and and cable.

1:17:37 I also saw it very early on as a double edged sword. I did. I did not like what I saw and I and I have never changed my mind. What do you think of video podcasts like this? I think your podcast should be mandatory in all of the schools in America and all of the medical schools. Absolutely every person looking for a new eye doctor should see your stuff. Well, thanks. Thanks very much. I appreciate that vote of confidence. This has been very entertaining and educational for me and I'm sure the audience out there as well.

1:18:19 Are there any fees you pay scale my parking, anything like that? We'll send it a check, don't worry about it, it checks in the mail already. I can see you've got into the business already. Right. Yeah. So I want to thank you really for taking the time this has been. You promised me we're going on tape that when I come in for an appointment I get right to the head of the line. No more sitting in this office for 6-7 hours to get in for a little high examination. Please. You're ruining my ophthalmology.

1:18:52 Career. No. No, you're not. I'm not. You're going to edit that. I'm not Joe Rogan yet, you know. This show may do it for you. That's why I asked you to become a guest here. That's right, you figure it out and I want to thank. I like these paper lights down here, whatever that is. Is that plastic? Or it's not paper, it's plastic. It's a diffuser. I figured that out. It reduces the shadows on the face, right? So you look fantastic.